Dan actually seemed to be coming along, for a while there. When I phoned him (admittedly drunkenly) to talk about our match and asked him, of curiosity, why he wanted so badly to fight me, I think he had never experienced anything approaching kindness before (at least not from an Internet person). I remember at one point saying, "Dan... Are you crying? I wasn't trying to make you upset."

He basically admitted that I was a stand-in for all the people who had ever picked on him. He tried to suggest that we have a simple MMA-style match so that nobody got hurt or arrested, and I went to sleep that night thinking the fight was still on. That morning, I discovered he had uploaded that video in which he called the whole thing off and declared me the winner (and cried again).

I honestly thought he really was focused on getting legitimate training, or at least more so, but at some point the ninjer peer pressure must have gotten to him and he started trash-talking me again. It wasn't too long after that when he got embroiled in this feud with Andrew, who seems like a very nice person.

I would travel to Alabama to watch this fight if I thought there was any chance Dan would show up.